committee acknowledged quite openly as bad politics for he and democrats to say we are going to cut medicare beneficiaries. he then went on and i think in the end, you can't be president and not be a realist. he said isn't tenable to not cut them because they are driving the budget deficit. the whole entitlement issue is the real core of this problem. a taxing issue, yes. the pyrotechnics. there's the struggle between the republican and democratic view. they all know it's the entitlement issue. so if you, but some some sort of fix, trajectory to make it somehow stable is the real issue. you have something from the boat. >> your books are ultimately about the power, how it's used, squandered, built spirits of the subtext of these events is how life works. and my favorite sentence in the price of politics is when you meet friends -- need friends comments to late to make them. tell us what she learned about washington and life in the grand bargain. what is a hundred your lesson from how bad unravels? >> evening would have been last year? they found a way to postpone everything. again, they can